How the Copyright Alert System launched, 2011 to 2013

Archive summary, written 2026. The launch of six strikes took nearly 20 months, from a signed agreement in July 2011 to the first alerts in February 2013. This page tells that story from documents and reporting of the time. It is part of our history of the Copyright Alert System, and this site is not the Center for Copyright Information, which ran this domain and the program.

Many news stories from 2012 and 2013 linked to launch announcements on this domain. Those announcements are gone, so this page records the dates and positions they described, in our own words, with links to reporting that still exists.

01The July 2011 agreement

The program rested on a Memorandum of Understanding whose final text is dated July 6, 2011. Its parties were the RIAA, the MPAA and their major studios and labels, and five providers: AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. It set up the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) and a four-step, six-alert warning program for home broadband customers.

The deal was announced with support from rights holders, providers and some public officials. Rights holders saw an education-first alternative to suing individual file sharers. Providers kept control of how they dealt with their own customers.

Critics responded within days. In a July 18, 2011 analysis, the EFF and law professor Eric Goldman said subscribers had no seat at the table. They argued that alerts treated accusations as presumptively accurate, and that review allowed only six defenses on a short deadline. A full summary of the text is in our plain-English guide to the six strikes agreement.

02Building the system in 2012

The agreement left a long list of work. CCI needed an executive director, an executive committee and an advisory board. Rights holders needed a monitoring firm. Each provider needed its own alert program and an implementation agreement. And the American Arbitration Association had to be ready to hear reviews.

In April 2012 CCI named its leadership and an advisory board that included consumer advocates. The EFF answered that advisers were not decision makers and urged the parties to "press reset" on the deal. By October 2012, reporting named MarkMonitor as the firm that would detect file sharing for the rights holders.

In October 2012 CCI said a technical expert, Stroz Friedberg, had reviewed the monitoring methods and found them accurate. TorrentFreak reported on October 22, 2012 that the same firm had lobbied for the RIAA between 2004 and 2009. Critics said that undercut the agreement's call for an impartial expert; CCI stood by the review.

03Delays and the February 2013 start

The first alerts were expected before the end of 2011. That target passed, and so did a later July 2012 date. On November 28, 2012, TorrentFreak reported a new statement from CCI's executive director, Jill Lesser. Because of "unexpected factors largely stemming from Hurricane Sandy" that affected final testing, alerts would begin in early 2013 rather than by the end of the year.

The same report said the harder problem was getting every provider and the arbitration association to move at once. Some commentators doubted the storm was the whole explanation. CCI stuck to its account that it wanted every detail settled before any alert went out.

The program finally began in the last week of February 2013. The Register reported on February 25, 2013 that the five providers would begin rolling out alerts that week, and quoted Lesser's launch post hoping the approach would "serve as a model". Providers started on slightly different days, as CCI had said they would.

04How the press and critics reacted

Coverage at launch split along familiar lines. Supporters stressed that the first alerts only informed, that no account would be terminated as a program penalty, and that the process kept subscribers' names from rights holders. The Register summed up the stated aim as a policy to "educate rather than punish".

Technology writers raised practical doubts. The Register noted that the system would not touch streaming or cloud storage sites at all. The EFF published a subscriber FAQ the same week. It warned about the $35 review fee, the limited defenses and the effect on open Wi-Fi, and noted that people using a VPN or Tor would not be identified.

Questions about cost ran through it all. The agreement split CCI's funding equally between rights holders and providers, and the EFF's 2011 analysis predicted that providers would pass administration costs on to subscribers.

05What subscribers were told

Subscribers learned about the program in three ways. CCI ran public explainers, including a short video and FAQ pages on this domain. Providers described their own alerts and penalties, though at launch few had published full details. And news coverage filled in what the official material did not say.

The core message was the same everywhere. The first alerts were educational. Later alerts needed a click to confirm. Penalties were temporary, and review was available before any penalty, for a fee. For the full ladder, see what each Copyright Alert said and did.

What subscribers were not told at launch was how many alerts would be sent or how often reviews would succeed. Those numbers came later, in May 2014, and are covered on the page about the program's reports and results.

06Where to read the originals

CCI's launch statements and blog posts were published on this domain between 2012 and 2013 and are no longer here. Public web archives keep copies of the old pages under their original addresses, and the reporting linked above quotes the key lines.

The agreement itself is still available online in copies kept by lawyers and researchers who tracked the program; our summary of the Memorandum of Understanding explains where copies survive and which sections matter most. We summarize documents rather than republish them, because the original text belongs to its authors.